In the end tho, I don't want to have to deal with low-level stuff. I want to be able to get down and focus on the game itself as quickly as possible. To be able to quickly prototype ideas without having to worry about efficient backing systems. I'm really only interested in 2d games at the moment.

So, Ima ask what you guys suggest, and stick with it! A form of Basic (KBasic/FutureBasic/idk), a scripting language and some engine to go with? An engine that uses its own scripting language? I don't know. However, I do want to stay coding. No drag and drop please.

Unity is very solid, with a fast edit-debug cycle. Scripting is very powerful, as it uses Mono, the extensive open-source version of .Net. Unity takes care of handling textures, models, and sound formats so you can concentrate on your game logic rather than boilerplate code.

For true 2D games it's less ideal. (I've personally made a couple of games with it which are largely 2D in gameplay but the graphics are 3D; that worked fine.) And they've announced that a package of 2D-oriented enhancements to Unity is in development and will probably come out later this year. In the meantime, there are free and cheap enhancements people have added to Unity to make working with sprites easier.

As someone driven to make games but without a whole lot of free time, I've found Unity to be indispensable. Making games is still hard, but I'm having more fun working on the logic and appearance that make my game unique, not low-level things like PNG import code or trying to make the music track loop seamlessly.

Also note that you will end up paying if you want to release to iPhone, PS3, Android, etc. Not all editions of Unity are free, though the iPhone Basic edition is cheap. I've given them a fair bit of money over the years and never regretted it (when I started the basic edition wasn't free like it is now.)

LÖVE is pretty nice from what I remember and I know a couple of people who like py-something a lot. Personally, I absolutely hate the indie version of Unity3d, and if I do use it, I have to end up using Blender more, to the point that I might as well be using BGE. But, for your purposes, it might be fine.

(Jul 27, 2010 04:04 AM)MattDiamond Wrote: I'd head over to Unity3d.com and download the free edition of Unity.
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Cool, I'll have to check it out. Part of the issue, however, is that I recently received an ASUS 701 EEEpc running Debian lenny. I'd like to be able to do lots of my work on it, if possible.

You do know you posted the question to a Mac/iPhone game dev forum, right? :-)

Unity is very flexible about the types of assets it imports so you could at least create textures, sounds, and models on your laptop. You could also edit scripts of course, although you'd be unable to test them.

trying making a game using GameSalad. You don't need to code. A lot of artists and designers worked on it without any programming help ( can be mastered if needed ). The community is fantastic. You can publish the game on the App Store AND Android Market (new feature)